. . .

Monthly Archives: November 2012

It’s been a while since my last post, but i have a whole bunch of recipes to post, that have been festering for a while somewhere in my computer. Here is the first of many!

If you have been following this blog for a while you will remember that the some of the firsts posts i did were regarding Sourdough bread. Back then i had a weak starter that took some time to figure out exactly how to get it to work right. Eventually though the starter died for one reason or another, and i didn’t ever make a new one.

Recently though for my birthday i was given 1 cup of a starter named Bernie by my good friends Nick and Mandy.

Bernie is tried and true, and has his roots from many generations ago. So i started again with my bread making endeavors!

Here’s my new recipe for sourdough bread. This will work with just about any starter, but as always i have notes as to what i might change next time to make an even better loaf.

First I decided to multiply the starter so I always have extra.

I added 3 cups of flour and 2 cups of water to the1 cup of starter

Then I let this sit for actually almost 24 hours. (A little bit longer than necessary but that’s just how the timing worked out). All those Bernie bacterias got to work in there!

I then removed 2 cups for future generations of Bernie…

To the remaining sponge I added 1/4 cup of olive oil and 1/2 tablespoon of salt. I folded that in and then added about 2 cups of flour. At this point I was able to handle the dough I added about stony her 1/2 to 1 cup of flour through kneading. Knead for 5 minutes then let it rest for 5 and then knead 5 more minutes. (Next time i think i will knead longer) Form into a ball.

I let it rise for about 2.5 hours. About halfway through I made a kind of rising box by putting rolling up a warm damp kitchen towel and Putting the towel and the dough underneath a large Tupperware container. This definitely helped the rising…. But i think it could still be warmer in my kitchen while rising – this would make it even better

I then preheated the oven to 450 with my pizza/bread stone in it. After it was preheated I out the bread in and sprayed it with water (crucial step!)

After 30 minutes I rotated the bread, sprayed it with water again and turned the oven down to 375. I continued baking for another 40 minutes but it could have stayed in another 20 I think. It needed a little bit more in the very middle..

Then I let it rest as long as I could manage before I had to eat about half of it…